Iran’s Supreme Leader Threatens the USA and Israel

Iran is up to their old tricks again calling out the “great Satan” (the USA) and acting all anti-Semitic and harassing Israel. This time it’s their Supreme Leader the Ayatollah Khamanei who is threatening Israel’s existence. Here’s my question if their supreme religious and political leader is willing to threaten an entire nation (or two) of people what would their people be willing to do?

The reason that our relationship is so antagonistic with Iran is because their entire population has been poisoned by their leaders…

A U.S.-sponsored agreement on Iran’s use of nuclear energy may be near, but that hasn’t stopped Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from assailing Israel and the United States on Twitter.

This comes just days after Khamenei casually asked his Twitter followers: “how can #Israel be eliminated?”

In a series of tweets hashtagged #HandsOffAlAqsa, the senior cleric, who serves as Iran’s head of state, called Israel’s government “barbaric, wolflike and infanticidal.” One tweet included a nine-item chart explaining a step-by-step strategy of hostility and confrontation against Israel.

The messages were apparently part of a Twitter campaign protesting Israel’s security-motivated closure of access to the holy sites atop the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which includes the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in all of Islam.

The vitriolic tweets came just an hour after a routine announcement appointing a new head to Iran’s national broadcasting agency. Not soon after, Khamenei’s account turned to the subject of the nuclear deal, with a chart explaining the “5 features of Iranian diplomacy,” which include “open, strong and genuine support for the oppressed.”

Alex Vatanka, an Iran scholar at the Middle East Institute, is baffled by Khamenei’s tweets. The Supreme Leader chose to blast Israel “at the worst moment you could have imagined,” he told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Having been Supreme Leader of Iran for a quarter-century, he can’t claim ignorance of how sensitive this topic is in Washington. He can’t claim not to know the damage such rhetoric creates for Iran’s international standing.” Moreover, Vatanka said, this hurts Iran’s reputation in countries where it seeks greater legitimacy: “you cannot claim to be a stabilizing force in the Middle East when you go around saying one of the countries in the neighborhood needs to disappear.”

Khamenei has put his support behind the nuclear agreement “for one simple reason: he wants the sanctions to be removed,” Vatanka said. Economic sanctions by the United States and other countries have squeezed Iran’s economy, depreciated its currency, and increased its international isolation, at a time when President Hassan Rouhani is attempting to restore Iran’s legitimacy on the world stage.

“The expectations on the Iranian side for the release of sanctions are very big,” Barbara Slavin, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and Washington correspondent for the news site Al-Monitor.com, told TheDCNF. “I find it difficult to believe that Iran’s leaders will just walk away from a deal,” she said. Yet Slavin is unsurprised by the Supreme Leader’s vitriol against Israel. “I’ve endured Khamenei’s speeches for years — his rhetoric doesn’t really change very much. And if you look at his Twitter feed, what he’s putting out there for an English-speaking audience isn’t different from what he’s doing for the domestic side.”

Slavin also suggested that Khamenei may be operating shrewdly to pacify right-wing objectors to reconciliation with America. “If anything, this may be a positive sign for a deal, in the sense that he’s already preparing the ground” against domestic objectors, signaling his legitimacy by affirming the anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli values of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution. (RELATED: U.S.-Iran Nuke Deal Preserves Iran’s Nuclear Program)

Iran’s top nuclear negotiator recently thanked Khamenei publicly for his support and leadership. But Vatanka fears what Khamenei’s tweets may indicate about actions behind the scenes in Tehran: Khamenei appears to be “undermining the same government that he has said for the last year he supports,” and contradicting the tone of such advances as the Rosh Hashanah greeting sent by Rouhani last year. “If this tension continues, then somebody has to give. I don’t see how the two visions, one seeking respectability and one advancing the Revolution, will be reconciled in the long term.”

About the author

Onan Coca

Onan is the Editor-in-Chief at Romulus Marketing. He's also the managing editor at Eaglerising.com, Constitution.com and the managing partner at iPatriot.com. You can read more of his writing at Eagle Rising.
Onan is a graduate of Liberty University (2003) and earned his M.Ed. at Western Governors University in 2012. Onan lives in Atlanta with his wife and their three wonderful children.